Annihilation

04: Immersion

Everything I knew about the psychologist came from my observations during training. She had served both as a kind of distant overseer and in a more personal role as our confessor. Except, I had nothing to confess. Perhaps I confessed more under hypnosis, but during our regular sessions, which I had agreed to as a condition of being accepted for the expedition, I volunteered little.

“Tell me about your parents. What are they like?” she would ask, a classic opening gambit.

“Normal,” I replied, trying to smile while thinking distant, impractical, irrelevant, moody, useless.

“Your mother is an alcoholic, correct? And your father is a kind of … con man?”

I almost exhibited a lack of control at what seemed like an insult, not an insight. I almost protested, defiantly, “My mother is an artist and my father is an entrepreneur.”

“What are your earliest memories?”

“Breakfast.” A stuffed puppy toy I still have today. Putting a magnifying glass up to an ant lion’s sinkhole. Kissing a boy and making him strip for me because I didn’t know any better. Falling into a fountain and banging my head; the result, five stitches in the emergency room and an abiding fear of drowning. In the emergency room again when Mom drank too much, followed by the relief of almost a year of sobriety.

Of all of my answers, “Breakfast” annoyed her the most. I could see it in the corners of her mouth fighting a downward turn, her rigid stance, the coldness in her eyes. But she kept her control.

“Did you have a happy childhood?”

“Normal,” I replied. My mom once so out of it that she poured orange juice into my cereal instead of milk. My dad’s incessant, nervous chatter, which made him seem perpetually guilty of something. Cheap motels for vacations by the beach where Mom would cry at the end because we had to go back to the normal strapped-for-cash life, even though we’d never really left it. That sense of impending doom occupying the car.

“How close were you to your extended family?”

“Close enough.” Birthday cards suitable for a five-year-old even when I was twenty. Visits once every couple of years. A kindly grandfather with long yellow fingernails and the voice of a bear. A grandmother who lectured on the value of religion and saving your pennies. What were their names?

“How do you feel about being part of a team?”

“Just fine. I’ve often been part of teams.” And by “part of,” I mean off to the side.

“You were let go from a number of your field jobs. Do you want to tell me why?”

She knew why, so, again, I shrugged and said nothing.

“Are you only agreeing to join this expedition because of your husband?”

“How close were you and your husband?”

“How often did you fight? Why did you fight?”

“Why didn’t you call the authorities the moment he returned to your house?”

These sessions clearly frustrated the psychologist on a professional level, on the level of her ingrained training, which was predicated on drawing personal information out of patients in order to establish trust and then delve into deeper issues. But on another level I could never quite grasp, she seemed to approve of my answers. “You’re very self-contained,” she said once, but not as a pejorative. It was only as we walked for a second day from the border toward base camp that it struck me that perhaps the very qualities she might disapprove of from a psychiatric point of view made me suitable for the expedition.

Now she sat propped up against a mound of sand, sheltered by the shadow of the wall, in a kind of broken pile, one leg straight out, the other trapped beneath her. She was alone. I could see from her condition and the shape of the impact that she had jumped or been pushed from the top of the lighthouse. She probably hadn’t quite cleared the wall, been hurt by it on the way down. While I, in my methodical way, had spent hours going through the journals, she had been lying here the whole time. What I couldn’t understand was why she was still alive.

Her jacket and shirt were covered in blood, but she was breathing and her eyes were open, looking out toward the ocean as I knelt beside her. She had a gun in her left hand, left arm outstretched, and I gently took the weapon from her, tossed it to the side, just in case.

The psychologist did not seem to register my presence. I touched her gently on one broad shoulder, and then she screamed, lunged away, falling over as I recoiled.

“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.

“It’s just me, the biologist,” I said in a calm voice, even though she had rattled me.

“Just you,” she said with a wheezing chuckle, as if I’d said something funny. “Just you.”

As I propped her up again, I heard a kind of creaking groan and realized she had probably broken most of her ribs. Her left arm and shoulder felt spongy under her jacket. Dark blood was seeping out around her stomach, beneath the hand she had instinctively pressed down on that spot. I could smell that she had pissed herself.

“You’re still here,” she said, surprise in her voice. “But I killed you, didn’t I?” The voice of someone waking from dream or falling into dream.

“Not even a little bit.”

A rough wheeze again, and the film of confusion leaving her eyes. “Did you bring water? I’m thirsty.”

“I did,” and I pressed my canteen to her mouth so she could swallow a few gulps. Drops of blood glistened on her chin.

“Where is the surveyor?” the psychologist asked in a gasp.

“Back at the base camp.”

“Wouldn’t come with you?”

“No.” The wind was blowing back the curls of her hair, revealing a slashing wound on her forehead, possibly from impact with the wall above.

“Didn’t like your company?” the psychologist asked. “Didn’t like what you’ve become?”

A chill came over me. “I’m the same as always.”

The psychologist’s gaze drifted out to sea again. “I saw you, you know, coming down the trail toward the lighthouse. That’s how I knew for sure you had changed.”

“What did you see?” I asked, to humor her.

A cough, accompanied by red spittle. “You were a flame,” she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. “You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, through the ruined village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating…”

From the shift in her tone, I recognized that even now she was trying to hypnotize me.

“It won’t work,” I said. “I’m immune to hypnosis now.”

Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course you are. You were always difficult,” she said, as if talking to a child. Was that an odd sense of pride in her voice?

Perhaps I should have left the psychologist alone, let her die without providing any answers, but I could not find that level of grace within me.

A thought occurred, if I had looked so inhuman: “Why didn’t you shoot me dead as I approached?”

An unintentional leer as she swiveled her head to stare at me, unable to control all of the muscles in her face. “My arm, my hand, wouldn’t let me pull the trigger.”

That sounded delusional to me, and I had seen no sign of an abandoned rifle beside the beacon. I tried again. “And your fall? Pushed or an accident or on purpose?”

A frown appeared, a true perplexity expressed through the network of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if the memory were only coming through in fragments. “I thought … I thought something was after me. I tried to shoot you, and couldn’t and then you were inside. Then I thought I saw something behind me, coming toward me from the stairs, and I felt such an overwhelming fear I had to get away from it. So I jumped out over the railing. I jumped.” As if she couldn’t believe she had done such a thing.

“What did the thing coming after you look like?”

A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: “I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what’s inside me.”

I didn’t believe any part of that fragmented explanation at the time, which seemed to imply something had followed her from the Tower. I interpreted the frenzy of her disassociation as part of a need for control. She had lost control of the expedition, and so she had to find someone or something to blame her failure on, no matter how improbable.

I tried a different approach: “Why did you take the anthropologist down into the ‘tunnel’ in the middle of the night? What happened there?”

She hesitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from caution or because something inside her body was breaking down. Then she said, “A miscalculation. Impatience. I needed intel before we risked the whole mission. I needed to know where we stood.”

“You mean, the progress of the Crawler?”

She smiled wickedly. “Is that what you call it? The Crawler?”

“What happened?” I asked.

“What do you think happened? It all went wrong. The anthropologist got too close.” Translation: The psychologist had forced her to get close. “The thing reacted. It killed her, wounded me.”

“Which is why you looked so shaken the next morning.”

“Yes. And because I could tell that you were already changing.”

“I’m not changing!” I shouted it, an unexpected rage rising inside of me.

A wet chuckle, a mocking tone. “Of course you’re not. You’re just becoming more of what you’ve always been. And I’m not changing, either. None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.”

“Shut up. Why did you abandon us?”

“The expedition had been compromised.”

“That isn’t an explanation.”

“Did you ever give me a proper explanation, during training?”

“We hadn’t been compromised, not enough to abandon the mission.”

“Sixth day after reaching base camp and one person is dead, two already changing, the fourth wavering? I would call that a disaster.”

“If it was a disaster, you helped create it.” I realized that as much as I mistrusted the psychologist personally, I had come to rely on her to lead the expedition. On some level, I was furious that she had betrayed us, furious that she might be leaving me now. “You just panicked, and you gave up.”

The psychologist nodded. “That, too. I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed. I should have sent you back to the border. I shouldn’t have gone down there with the anthropologist. But here we are.” She grimaced, coughed out a thick wetness.

I ignored the jab, changed the line of questioning. “What does the border look like?”

That smile again. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“What really happens when we cross over?”

“Not what you might expect.”

“Tell me! What do we cross through?” I felt as if I were getting lost. Again.

There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage. “I want you to think about something. You might be immune to hypnosis—you might—but what about the veil already in place? What if I removed that veil so you could access your own memories of crossing the border?” the psychologist asked. “Would you like that, Little Flame? Would you like it or would you go mad?”

“If you try to do anything to me, I’ll kill you,” I said—and meant it. The thought of hypnosis in general, and the conditioning behind it, had been difficult for me, an invasive price to be paid in return for access to Area X. The thought of further tampering was intolerable.

“How many of your memories do you think are implanted?” the psychologist asked. “How many of your memories of the world beyond the border are verifiable?”

“That won’t work on me,” I told her. “I am sure of the here and now, this moment, and the next. I am sure of my past.” That was ghost bird’s castle keep, and it was inviolate. It might have been punctured by the hypnosis during training, but it had not been breached. Of this I was certain, and would continue to be certain, because I had no choice.

“I’m sure your husband felt the same way before the end,” the psychologist said.

I sat back on my haunches, staring at her. I wanted to leave her before she poisoned me, but I couldn’t.

“Let’s stick to your own hallucinations,” I said. “Describe the Crawler to me.”

“There are things you must see with your own eyes. You might get closer. You might be more familiar to it.” Her lack of regard for the anthropologist’s fate was hideous, but so was mine.

“What did you hide from us about Area X?”

“Too general a question.” I think it amused the psychologist, even dying, for me to so desperately need answers from her.

“Okay, then: What do the black boxes measure?”

“Nothing. They don’t measure anything. It’s just a psychological ploy to keep the expedition calm: no red light, no danger.”

“What is the secret behind the Tower?”

“The tunnel? If we knew, do you think we would keep sending in expeditions?”

“They’re scared. The Southern Reach.”

“That is my impression.”

“Then they have no answers.”

“I’ll give you this scrap: The border is advancing. For now, slowly, a little bit more every year. In ways you wouldn’t expect. But maybe soon it’ll eat a mile or two at a time.”

The thought of that silenced me for a long moment. When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire. The black boxes might do nothing but in my mind they were all blinking red.

“How many expeditions have there been?”

“Ah, the journals,” she said. “There are quite a lot of them, aren’t there?”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Maybe I don’t know the answer. Maybe I just don’t want to tell you.”

It was going to continue this way, to the end, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“What did the ‘first’ expedition really find?”

The psychologist grimaced, and not from her pain this time, but more as if she were remembering something that caused her shame. “There’s video from that expedition … of a sort. The main reason no advanced tech was allowed after that.”

Video. Somehow, after searching through the mound of journals, that information didn’t startle me. I kept moving forward.

“What orders didn’t you reveal to us?”

“You’re beginning to bore me. And I’m beginning to fade a little … Sometimes we tell you more, sometimes less. They have their metrics and their reasons.” Somehow the “they” felt made of cardboard, as if she didn’t quite believe in “them.”

Reluctantly, I returned to the personal. “What do you know about my husband?”

“Nothing more than you’ll find out from reading his journal. Have you found it yet?”

“No,” I lied.

“Very insightful—about you, especially.”

Was that a bluff? She’d certainly had enough time up in the lighthouse to find it, read it, and toss it back onto the pile.

It didn’t matter. The sky was darkening and encroaching, the waves deepening, the surf making the shorebirds scatter on their stilt legs and then regroup as it receded. The sand seemed suddenly more porous around us. The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface. A whole community lived here, was going about its business, oblivious to our conversation. And where out there lay the seaward border? When I had asked the psychologist during training she had said only that no one had ever crossed it, and I had imagined expeditions that just evaporated into mist and light and distance.

A rattle had entered the psychologist’s breathing, which was now shallow and inconsistent.

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” Relenting.

“Leave me here when I die,” she said. Now all her fear was visible. “Don’t bury me. Don’t take me anywhere. Leave me here where I belong.”

“Is there anything else you’re willing to tell me?”

“We should never have come here. I should never have come here.” The rawness in her tone hinted at a personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition.

“That’s all?”

“I’ve come to believe it is the one fundamental truth.”

I took her to mean that it was better to let the border advance, to ignore it, let it affect some other, more distant generation. I didn’t agree with her, but I said nothing. Later, I would come to believe she had meant something altogether different.

“Has anyone ever really come back from Area X?”

“Not for a long time now,” the psychologist said in a tired whisper. “Not really.” But I don’t know if she had heard the question.

Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been “remote” or “demote” and another that might have been “hatching” or “watching.” But I could not be sure.

Soon dusk would descend. I gave her more water. It was hard to think of her as an adversary the closer she came to death, even though clearly she knew so much more than she had told me. Regardless, it didn’t bear much thought because she wasn’t going to divulge anything else. And maybe I had looked to her like a flame as I came near. Maybe that was the only way she could think of me now.

“Did you know about the pile of journals?” I asked. “Before we came here?”

But she did not answer.

There were things I had to do after she died, even though I was running short of daylight, even though I did not like doing them. If she wouldn’t answer my questions while alive, then she would have to answer some of them now. I took off the psychologist’s jacket and laid it to the side, discovering in the process that she had hidden her own journal in a zippered inside pocket, folded up. I put that to the side, too, under a stone, the pages flapping in the gusts of wind.

Then I took out my penknife and, with great care, cut away the left sleeve of her shirt. The sponginess of her shoulder had bothered me, and I saw I’d had good reason to be concerned. From her collarbone down to her elbow, her arm had been colonized by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness, which gave off a faint glow. From the indentations and long rift running down her triceps, it appeared to have spread from an initial wound—the wound she said she had received from the Crawler. Whatever had contaminated me, this different and more direct contact had spread faster and had more disastrous consequences. Certain parasites and fruiting bodies could cause not just paranoia but schizophrenia, all-too-realistic hallucinations, and thus promote delusional behavior. I had no doubt now that she had seen me as a flame approaching, that she had attributed her inability to shoot me to some exterior force, that she had been assailed by the fear of some approaching presence. If nothing else, the memory of the encounter with the Crawler would, I imagined, have unhinged her to some degree.

I cut a skin sample from her arm, along with some of the flesh beneath, and prodded it into a collection vial. Then I took another sample from her other arm. Once I got back to base camp, I would examine both.

I was shaking a little by then, so I took a break, turned my attention to the journal. It was devoted to transcribing the words on the wall of the Tower, was filled with so many new passages:

… but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive …

There were a few notes scribbled in the margins. One read “lighthouse keeper,” which made me wonder if she’d circled the man in the photograph. Another read “North?” and a third “island.” I had no clue what these notes meant—or what it said about the psychologist’s state of mind that her journal was devoted to this text. I felt only a simple, uncomplicated relief that someone had completed a task for me that would have been laborious and difficult otherwise. My only question was whether she had gotten the text from the walls of the Tower, from journals within the lighthouse, or from some other source entirely. I still don’t know.

Careful to avoid contact with her shoulder and arm, I then searched the psychologist’s body. I patted down her shirt, her pants, searching for anything hidden. I found a tiny handgun strapped to her left calf and a letter in a small envelope folded up in her right boot. The psychologist had written a name on the envelope; at least, it looked like her handwriting. The name started with an S. Was it her child’s name? A friend? A lover? I had not seen a name or heard a name spoken aloud for months, and seeing one now bothered me deeply. It seemed wrong, as if it did not belong in Area X. A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn’t need names. People who served a function didn’t need to be named. In all ways, the name was a further and unwanted confusion to me, a dark space that kept growing and growing in my mind.

I tossed the gun far across the sand, balled up the envelope, sent it after the gun. I was thinking of having discovered my husband’s journal, and how in some ways that discovery was worse than its absence. And, on some level, I was still angry at the psychologist.

Finally I searched her pants pockets. I found some change, a smooth worry stone, and a slip of paper. On the paper I found a list of hypnotic suggestions that included “induce paralysis,” “induce acceptance,” and “compel obedience,” each corresponding to an activation word or phrase. She must have been intensely afraid of forgetting which words gave her control over us, to have written them down. Her cheat sheet included other reminders, like: “Surveyor needs reinforcement” and “Anthropologist’s mind is porous.” About me she had only this cryptic phrase: “Silence creates its own violence.” How insightful.

The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.”

We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.

Part of my husband’s life had been defined by nightmares he’d had as a child. These debilitating experiences had sent him to a psychiatrist. They involved a house and a basement and the awful crimes that had occurred there. But the psychiatrist had ruled out suppressed memory, and he was left at the end with just trying to draw the poison by keeping a diary about them. Then, as an adult at university, a few months before he’d joined the navy, he had gone to a classic film festival … and there, up on the big screen, my future husband had seen his nightmares acted out. It was only then that he realized the television set must have been left on at some point when he was only a couple of years old, with that horror movie playing. The splinter in his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing. He said that was the moment he knew he was free, that it was from then on that he left behind the shadows of his childhood … because it had all been an illusion, a fake, a forgery, a scrawling across his mind that had falsely made him go in one direction when he had been meant to go in another.

“I’ve had a kind of dream for a while now,” he confessed to me the night he told me he had agreed to join the eleventh expedition. “A new one, and not really a nightmare this time.”

In these dreams, he floated over a pristine wilderness as if from the vantage point of a marsh hawk, and the feeling of freedom “is indescribable. It’s as if you took everything from my nightmares and reversed it.” As the dreams progressed and repeated, they varied in their intensity and their viewpoint. Some nights he swam through the marsh canals. Others, he became a tree or a drop of water. Everything he experienced refreshed him. Everything he experienced made him want to go to Area X.

Although he couldn’t tell me much, he confessed that he already had met several times with people who recruited for the expeditions. That he had talked to them for hours, that he knew this was the right decision. It was an honor. Not everyone was taken—some were rejected and others lost the thread along the way. Still others, I pointed out to him, must have wondered what they had done, after it was too late. All I understood of what he called Area X at the time came from the vague official story of environmental catastrophe, along with rumors and sideways whispers. Danger? I’m not sure this crossed my mind so much as the idea that my husband had just told me he wanted to leave me and had withheld the information for weeks. I was not yet privy to the idea of hypnosis or reconditioning, so it did not occur to me that he might have been made suggestible during his meetings.

My response was a profound silence as he searched my face for what he thought he hoped to find there. He turned away, sat on the couch, while I poured myself a very large glass of wine and took the chair opposite him. We remained that way for a long time.

A little later, he started to talk again—about what he knew of Area X, about how his work right now wasn’t fulfilling, how he needed more of a challenge. But I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about my mundane job. I was thinking about the wilderness. I was wondering why I hadn’t done something like he was doing now: dreaming of another place, and how to get there. In that moment, I couldn’t blame him, not really. Didn’t I sometimes go off on field trips for my job? I might not be gone for months, but in principle it was the same thing.

The arguing came later, when it became real to me. But never pleading. I never begged him to stay. I couldn’t do that. Perhaps he even thought that going away would save our marriage, that somehow it would bring us closer together. I don’t know. I have no clue. Some things I will never be good at.

But as I stood beside the psychologist’s body looking out to sea, I knew that my husband’s journal waited for me, that soon I would know what sort of nightmare he had encountered here. And I knew, too, that I still blamed him fiercely for his decision … and yet even so, somewhere in the heart of me I had begun to believe there was no place I would rather be than in Area X.

I had lingered too long and would have to travel through the dark to make it back to base camp. If I kept up a steady pace, I might make it back by midnight. There was some advantage in arriving at an unexpected hour, given how I had left things with the surveyor. Something also warned me against staying at the lighthouse overnight. Perhaps it was just the unease from seeing the strangeness of the psychologist’s wound or perhaps I still felt as if a presence inhabited that place, but regardless I set out soon after gathering up my knapsack full of supplies and my husband’s journal. Behind me lay the increasingly solemn silhouette of what was no longer really a lighthouse but instead a kind of reliquary. As I stared back, I saw a thin green fountain of light gushing up, framed by the curve of the dunes, and felt even more resolve to put miles between us. It was the psychologist’s wound, from where she lay on the beach, glowing more brightly than before. The suggestion of some sped-up form of life burning fiercely did not bear close scrutiny. Another phrase I had seen copied in her journal came to mind: There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.

Within the hour, the lighthouse had disappeared into the night, and with it the beacon the psychologist had become. The wind picked up, the darkness intensified. The ever-more distant sound of waves was like eavesdropping on a sinister, whispering conversation. I walked as quietly as possible through the ruined village under just a sliver of moon, unwilling to risk my flashlight. The shapes in the exposed remains of rooms had gathered a darkness about them that stood out against the night and in their utter stillness I sensed an unnerving suggestion of movement. I was glad to soon be past them and onto the part of the trail where the reeds choked both the canal on the seaward side and the little lakes to the left. In a while, I would encounter the black water and cypress trees, vanguard for the sturdy utility of the pines.

A few minutes later, the moaning started. For a moment I thought it was in my head. Then I stopped abruptly, stood there listening. Whatever we had heard every night at dusk was at it again, and in my eagerness to leave the lighthouse I had forgotten it lived in the reeds. This close the sound was more guttural, filled with confused anguish and rage. It seemed so utterly human and inhuman, that, for the second time since entering Area X, I considered the supernatural. The sound came from ahead of me and from the landward side, through the thick reeds that kept the water away from the sides of the trail. It seemed unlikely I could pass by without it hearing me. And what then?

Finally I decided to forge ahead. I took out the smaller of my two flashlights and crouched as I turned it on so the beam couldn’t easily be seen above the reeds. In this awkward way, I walked forward, gun drawn in my other hand, alert to the direction of the sound. Soon I could hear it closer, if still distant, pushing through the reeds as it continued its horrible moaning.

A few minutes passed, and I made good progress. Then, abruptly, something nudged against my boot, flopped over. I aimed my flashlight at the ground—and leapt back, gasping. Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth. But when after a moment nothing further happened, I shone my light on it again and saw it was a kind of tan mask made of skin, half-transparent, resembling in its way the discarded shell of a horseshoe crab. A wide face, with a hint of pockmarks across the left cheek. The eyes were blank, sightless, staring. I felt as if I should recognize these features—that it was very important—but with them disembodied in this way, I could not.

Somehow the sight of this mask restored to me a measure of the calm that I had lost during my conversation with the psychologist. No matter how strange, a discarded exoskeleton, even if part of it resembled a human face, represented a kind of solvable mystery. One that, for the moment at least, pushed back the disturbing image of an expanding border and the countless lies told by the Southern Reach.

When I bent at the knees and shone my flashlight ahead, I saw more detritus from a kind of molting: a long trail of skin-like debris, husks, and sloughings. Clearly I might soon meet what had shed this material, and just as clearly the moaning creature was, or had once been, human.

I recalled the deserted village, the strange eyes of the dolphins. A question existed there that I might in time answer in too personal a way. But the most important question in that moment was whether just after molting the thing became sluggish or more active. It depended on the species, and I was not an expert on this one. Nor did I have much stamina left for a new encounter, even though it was too late to retreat.

Continuing on, I came to a place on the left where the reeds had been flattened, veering off to form a path about three feet wide. The moltings, if that’s what they were, veered off, too. Shining my flashlight down the path, I could see it curved sharply right after less than a hundred feet. This meant that the creature was already ahead of me, out in the reeds, and could possibly circle back and emerge to block my path back to base camp.

The dragging sounds had intensified, almost equal to the moaning. A thick musk clung to the air.

I still had no desire to return to the lighthouse, so I picked up my pace. Now the darkness was so complete I could only see a few feet ahead of me, the flashlight revealing little or nothing. I felt as if I were moving through an encircling tunnel. The moaning grew still louder, but I could not determine its direction. The smell became a special kind of stench. The ground began to sag a little under my weight, and I knew water must be close.

There came the moaning again, as close as I’d ever heard it, but now mixed with a loud thrashing sound. I stopped and stood on tiptoe to shine my flashlight over the reeds to my left in time to see a great disrupting wave of motion ahead at a right angle to the trail, and closing fast. A dislocation of the reeds, a fast smashing that made them fall as if machine-threshed. The thing was trying to outflank me, and the brightness within surged to cover my panic.

I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival?

If so, it was a very small part.

I ran. It surprised me how fast I could run—I’d never had to run that fast before. Down the tunnel of blackness lined with reeds, raked by them and not caring, willing the brightness to propel me forward. To get past the beast before it cut me off. I could feel the thudding vibration of its passage, the rasping clack of the reeds beneath its tread, and there was a kind of expectant tone to its moaning now that sickened me with the urgency of its seeking.

From out of the darkness there came an impression of a great weight, aimed at me from my left. A suggestion of the side of a tortured, pale visage and a great, ponderous bulk behind it. Barreling toward a point ahead of me, and me with no choice but to let it keep coming, lunging forward like a sprinter at the finish line, so I could be past it and free.

It was coming so fast, too fast. I could tell I wasn’t going to make it, couldn’t possibly make it, not at that angle, but I was committed now.

The crucial moment came. I thought I felt its hot breath on my side, flinched and cried out even as I ran. But then the way was clear, and from almost right behind I heard a high keening, and the feeling of the space, the air, suddenly filled, and the sound of something massive trying to brake, trying to change direction, and being pulled into the reeds on the opposite side of the trail by its own momentum. An almost plaintive keening, a lonely sound in that place, called out to me. And kept calling, pleading with me to return, to see it entire, to acknowledge its existence.

I did not look back. I kept running.

Eventually, gasping for air, I stopped. On rubbery legs I walked until the trail opened up into forest lands, far enough to find a large oak I could climb, and spent the night in an uncomfortable position wedged into a crook of the tree. If the moaning creature had followed me there, I don’t know what I would have done. I could still hear it, though far distant again. I did not want to think about it, but I could not stop thinking about it.

I drifted in and out of sleep, one watchful eye on the ground. Once, something large and snuffling paused at the base of the tree, but then went on its way. Another time, I had the sense of vague shapes moving in the middle distance, but nothing came of it. They seemed to stop for a moment, luminous eyes floating in the dark, but I sensed no threat from them. I held my husband’s journal to my chest like a talisman to ward off the night, still refusing to open it. My fears about what it might contain had only grown.

Sometime before morning, I woke again to find that my brightness had become literal: My skin gave off a faint phosphorescence against the darkness, and I tried to hide my hands in my sleeves, draw my collar up high, so I would be less visible, then drifted off again. Part of me just wanted to sleep forever, through the rest of anything that might occur.

But I did remember one thing, now: where I had seen the molted mask before—the psychologist from the eleventh expedition, a man I had seen interviewed after his return across the border. A man who had said, in a calm and even tone, “It was quite beautiful, quite peaceful in Area X. We saw nothing unusual. Nothing at all.” And then had smiled in a vague way.

Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border.

The next morning my head was still full of the moans of the creature as I reentered the part of Area X where the trail rose to a steep incline, and on either side the swampy black water was littered with the deceptively dead-seeming cypress knees. The water stole all sound, and its unmoving surface reflected back only gray moss and tree limbs. I loved this part of the trail as I loved no other. Here the world had a watchfulness matched only by a sense of peaceful solitude. The stillness was simultaneously an invitation to let down your guard and a rebuke against letting down your guard. Base camp was a mile away, and I was lazy with the light and the hum of insects in the tall grass. I was already rehearsing what I would say to the surveyor, what I would tell her and what I would withhold.

The brightness within me flared up. I had time to take a half step to the right.

The first shot took me in the left shoulder instead of the heart, and the impact twisted me as it pushed me back. The second shot ripped through my left side, not so much lifting me off my feet as making me spin and trip myself. Into the profound silence as I hit the incline and jounced down the hill there came a roaring in my ears. I lay at the bottom of the hill, breath knocked out of me, one outstretched hand plunged into the black water and the other arm trapped beneath me. The pain in my left side seemed at first as if someone kept opening me up with a butcher knife and sewing me back together. But it quickly subsided to a kind of roiling ache, the bullet wounds reduced through some cellular conspiracy to a sensation like the slow squirming inside me of tiny animals.

Only seconds had passed. I knew I had to move. Luckily, my gun had been holstered or it would have gone flying. I took it out now. I had seen the scope, a tiny circle in the tall grass, recognized who had set the ambush. The surveyor was ex-military, and good, but she couldn’t know that the brightness had protected me, that shock wasn’t overtaking me, that the wound hadn’t transfixed me with paralyzing pain.

I rolled onto my belly, intending to crawl along the water’s edge.

Then I heard the surveyor’s voice, calling out to me from the other side of the embankment: “Where is the psychologist? What did you do with her?”

I made the mistake of telling the truth.

“She’s dead,” I called back, trying to make my voice sound shaky and weak.

The surveyor’s only reply was to fire a round over my head, perhaps hoping I’d break cover.

“I didn’t kill the psychologist,” I shouted. “She jumped from the top of the lighthouse.”

“Risk for reward!” the surveyor responded, throwing it back at me like a grenade. She must have thought about that moment the whole time I’d been gone. It had no more effect on me than had my attempt to use it on her.

“Listen to me! You’ve hurt me—badly. You can leave me out here. I’m not your enemy.”

Pathetic words, placating words. I waited, but the surveyor didn’t reply. There was just the buzzing of the bees around the wildflowers, a gurgling of water somewhere in the black swamp beyond the embankment. I looked up at the stunning blue of the sky and wondered if it was time to start moving.

“Go back to base camp, take the supplies,” I shouted, trying again. “Return to the border. I don’t care. I won’t stop you.”

“I don’t believe you about any of it!” she shouted, the voice a little closer, advancing along the other side. Then: “You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should kill yourself so I don’t have to.” I didn’t like her casual tone.

“I’m as human as you,” I replied. “This is a natural thing,” and realized she wouldn’t understand that I was referring to the brightness. I wanted to say that I was a natural thing, too, but I didn’t know the truth of that—and none of this was helping plead my case anyway.

“Tell me your name!” she screamed. “Tell me your name! Tell me your goddamn fucking name!”

“That won’t make any difference,” I shouted back. “How would that make any difference? I don’t understand why that makes a difference.”

Silence was my answer. She would speak no more. I was a demon, a devil, something she couldn’t understand or had chosen not to. I could feel her coming ever closer, crouching for cover.

She wouldn’t fire again until she had a clear shot, whereas I had the urge to just charge her, firing wildly. Instead, I half crawled, half crept toward her, fast along the water’s edge. She might expect me to get away by putting distance between us, but I knew with the range of her rifle that was suicidal. I tried to slow my breathing. I wanted to be able to hear any sound she might make, giving away her position.

After a moment, I heard footsteps opposite me on the other side of the hill. I found a clump of muddy earth, and I lobbed it low and long down the edge of the black water, back the way I had come. As it was landing about fifty feet from me with a glutinous plop, I was edging my way up the hillside so I could just barely see the edge of the trail.

The top of the surveyor’s head rose up not ten feet ahead of me. She had dropped down to crawl through the long grass of the path. It was just a momentary glimpse. She was in plain view for less than a second, and then would be gone. I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I shot her.

Her head jolted to the side and she slumped soundlessly into the grass and turned over on her back with a groan, as if she had been disturbed in her sleep, and then lay still. The side of her face was covered with blood and her forehead looked grotesquely misshapen. I slid back down the incline. I was staring at my gun, shocked. I felt as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision to live in one of them. Now it was just me.

When I checked again, cautious and low against the side of the hill, I saw her still sprawled there, unmoving. I had never killed anyone before. I was not sure, given the logic of this place, that I had truly killed someone now. At least, this was what I told myself to control my shakes. Because behind it all, I kept thinking that I could have tried to reason with her a little longer, or not taken the shot and escaped into the wilderness.

I got up and made my way up the hill, feeling sore all over although my shoulder remained just a dull ache. Standing over the body, her rifle lying straight above her bloody head like an exclamation mark, I wondered what her last hours had been like at base camp. What doubts had racked her. If she had started back to the border, hesitated, returned to the camp, set out again, caught in a circle of indecision. Surely some trigger had driven her to confront me, or perhaps living alone in her own head overnight in this place had been enough. Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken. If I had come back when I’d promised, might it all have been different?

I couldn’t leave her there, but I hesitated about taking her back to base camp and burying her in the old graveyard behind the tents. The brightness within me made me unsure. What if there was a purpose for her in this place? Would burying her circumvent an ability to change that might belong to her, even now? Finally I rolled her over and over, the skin still elastic and warm, blood spooling out from the wound in her head, until she reached the water’s edge. Then I said a few words about how I hoped she would forgive me, and how I forgave her for shooting at me. I don’t know if my words made much sense to either of us at that point. It all sounded absurd to me as I said it. If she had suddenly been resurrected we would probably both admit we forgave nothing.

Carrying her in my arms, I waded into the black water. I let her go when I was knee-deep and watched her sink. When I could no longer see even the outstretched pale anemone of her left hand, I waded back to shore. I did not know if she was religious, expected to be resurrected in heaven or become food for the worms. But regardless, the cypress trees formed a kind of cathedral over her as she went deeper and deeper.

I had no time to absorb what had just happened, however. Soon after I stood once again on the trail, the brightness usurped many more places than just my nerve centers. I crumpled to the ground cocooned in what felt like an encroaching winter of dark ice, the brightness spreading into a corona of brilliant blue light with a white core. It felt like cigarette burns as a kind of searing snow drifted down and infiltrated my skin. Soon I became so frozen, so utterly numb, trapped there on the trail in my own body, that my eyes became fixed on the thick blades of grass in front of me, my mouth half open in the dirt. There should have been an awareness of comfort at being spared the pain of my wounds, but I was being haunted in my delirium.

I can remember only three moments from these hauntings. In the first, the surveyor, psychologist, and anthropologist peered down at me through ripples as if I were a tadpole staring up through a pool of water. They kept staring for an abnormally long time. In the second, I sat beside the moaning creature, my hand upon its head as I murmured something in a language I did not understand. In the third, I stared at a living map of the border, which had been depicted as if it were a great circular moat surrounding Area X. In that moat vast sea creatures swam, oblivious to me watching them; I could feel the absence of their regard like a kind of terrible bereavement.

All that time, I discovered later from thrash marks in the grass, I wasn’t frozen at all: I was spasming and twitching in the dirt like a worm, some distant part of me still experiencing the agony, trying to die because of it, even though the brightness wouldn’t let that happen. If I could have reached my gun, I think I would have shot myself in the head … and been glad of it.

It may be clear by now that I am not always good at telling people things they feel they have a right to know, and in this account thus far I have neglected to mention some details about the brightness. My reason for this is, again, the hope that any reader’s initial opinion in judging my objectivity might not be influenced by these details. I have tried to compensate by revealing more personal information than I would otherwise, in part because of its relevance to the nature of Area X.

The truth is that in the moments before the surveyor tried to kill me, the brightness expanded within me to enhance my senses, and I could feel the shifting of the surveyor’s hips as she lay against the ground and zeroed in on me through the scope. I could hear the sound of the beads of sweat as they trickled down her forehead. I could smell the deodorant she wore, and I could taste the yellowing grass she had flattened to set her ambush. When I shot her, it was with these enhanced senses still at work, and that was the only reason she was vulnerable to me.

This was, in extremis, a sudden exaggeration of what I had been experiencing already. On the way to the lighthouse and back, the brightness had manifested in part as a low-grade cold. I had run a mild fever, had coughed, and had sinus difficulties. I had felt faint at times and light-headed. A floating sensation and a heaviness had run through my body at intervals, never with any balance, so that I was either buoyant or dragging.

My husband would have been proactive about the brightness. He would have found a thousand ways to try to cure it—and to take away the scars, too—and not let me deal with it on my own terms, which is why during our time together I sometimes didn’t tell him when I was sick. But in this case, anyway, all of that effort on his part would have been pointless. You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.

When I finally returned to my senses it was already noon of the next day. Somehow I had managed to drag myself back to base camp. I was wrung out, a husk that needed to gulp down almost a gallon of water over the next hours to feel whole. My side burned, but I could tell that too-quick repair was taking place, enough for me to move about. The brightness, which had already infiltrated my limbs, now seemed in one final surge to have been fought to a draw by my body, its progress stunted by the need to tend to my injuries. The cold symptoms had receded and the lightness, the heaviness, had been replaced by a constant sustaining hum within me and for a time an unsettling sensation, as of something creeping under my skin, forming a layer that perfectly mimicked the one that could be seen.

I knew not to trust this feeling of well-being, that it could simply be the interregnum before another stage. Any relief that thus far the changes seemed no more radical than enhanced senses and reflexes and a phosphorescent tint to my skin paled before what I had now learned: To keep the brightness in check, I would have to continue to become wounded, to be injured. To shock my system.

In that context, when confronted with the chaos that was base camp my attitude was perhaps more prosaic than it might have been otherwise. The surveyor had hacked at the tents until long strips of the tough canvas fabric hung loose. The remaining records of scientific data left by prior expeditions had been burned; I could still see blackened fragments sticking out of the ash-crumbling logs. Any weapons she had been unable to carry with her she had destroyed by carefully taking them apart piece by piece; then she had scattered the pieces all around the camp as if to challenge me. Emptied-out cans of food lay strewn and gaping across the entire area. In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.

Her journal lay like an enticement on the remains of her bed in her tent, surrounded by a flurry of maps, some old and yellowing. But it was blank. Those few times I had seen her, apart from us, “writing” in it had been a deception. She had never had any intention of letting the psychologist or any of us know her true thoughts. I found I respected that.

Still, she had left one final, pithy statement, on a piece of paper by the bed, which perhaps helped explain her hostility: “The anthropologist tried to come back, but I took care of her.” She had either been crazy or all too sane. I carefully sorted through the maps, but they were not of Area X. She had written things on them, personal things that spoke to remembrance, until I realized that the maps must show places she had visited or lived. I could not fault her for returning to them, for searching for something from the past that might anchor her in the present, no matter how futile that quest.

As I explored the remains of base camp further, I took stock of my situation. I found a few cans of food she had somehow overlooked. She also had missed some of the drinking water because, as I always did, I had secreted some of it in my sleeping bag. Although all of my samples were gone—these I imagined she’d flung into the black swamp on her way back down the trail to set her ambush—nothing had been solved or helped by this behavior. I kept my measurements and observations about samples in a small notebook in my knapsack. I would miss my larger, more powerful microscope, but the one I’d packed would do. I had enough food to last me a couple of weeks as I did not eat much. My water would last another three or four days beyond that, and I could always boil more. I had enough matches to keep a fire going for a month, and the skills to create one without matches anyway. More supplies awaited me in the lighthouse, at the very least in the psychologist’s knapsack.

Out back, I saw what the surveyor had added to the old graveyard: an empty, newly dug grave with a mound of dirt out to the side—and stabbed into the ground, a simple cross made from fallen branches. Had the grave been meant to hold me or the anthropologist? Or both? I did not like the idea of lying next to the anthropologist for all eternity.

Cleaning up a little later, a fit of laughter came out of nowhere and made me double up in pain. I had suddenly remembered doing the dishes after dinner the night my husband had come back from across the border. I could distinctly recall wiping the spaghetti and chicken scraps from a plate and wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such a mundane act could coexist with the mystery of his reappearance.